COMMENTERS: I don’t have much else to say. I’m just happy to be able to reflect on the events of last week and hope for better, less traumatic nightmare scenarios in the future. When the news is all bad, do you like to stay plugged in, learning as much as you can, or do you like to tune out and wait until the dust settles to find out what happened? Is there any particular story or national event that you remember following obsessively or trying to avoid completely?

Comments (22)

My reaction is a mixture. I like to get the initial “what happened” and the initial response as close to real-time as possible, with the understanding that detailed specifics on what happened are going to be mighty thin on the ground for quite a while and about 90% of those details in the first hours generally turn out to be total bullshit.When the 24-hour newsies start talking to people who knew the alleged perp or one of the victims in preschool 20 years ago and start trotting out the “analysts”, I switch over to something else for a while. I’ll get a top-of-hour or bottom-of-hour recap, which will usually cover anything new that may have popped up, then back to what I was doing.

The first time I really did this was 1995, the Murrah Building in OKC. The internet wasn’t nearly what it was then (I hadn’t yet switched over to a proper ‘net dialup account, still being on GEnie, which had the Lynx text-only browser and generally sucked), but I had an uncle who was in that building (he was okay aside from a coating of dust and about 7 minutes missing from his personal timeline. Postal workrooms in Federal buildings are hardened to keep booms in, which also helps keep booms out) and his brother, a now-retired FBI agent, was one of the first feds on the scene – and one of the guys who escorted McVeigh off the chopper at Tinker AFB after he was flown back from Perry, so there was a personal interest there. (As it turns out, one of my HS classmates was one of the 168 victims — she was in the SS office tending to some paperwork issue or other and had a good chunk of the building land on her.)

So yeah, I’m a news junkie up to the point where the bullshit starts getting thick. Then I stop.

I remember being completely fixated on every detail of the Fukushima power plant coverage after the earthquake, and praying that the next bit of news would feature Godzilla. It would have been awesome. And I would have won a bet.I also remember completely avoiding anything to do with the 2012 US Presidential elections. They started campaigning in February or March of that year, and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it for over eight months. My roommate’s birthday was the day after elections, and we threw a “Huzzah! No More Politics!” party. We took shots until Dick Cheney looked attractive.

I tend to be like an empath for negativity, if I were to get sucked into the news it would ruin my mood for the week. That being said, I couldn’t help but get sucked in when the news was happening live on Reddit and Twitter staying up much later than I should have.

As a non-american, Boston still dominated our news whereas similar (and deadlier) events within the same range of kilometers didn’t even make the frontpage of the news. The hypocrisy of it is infuriating and reeks of racism.Don’t get me wrong: it’s bad news, of course, but I would expect professional journalism to at least make an attempt to not totally ignore 36 dead in bombings on the same day in another country while Boston (again: this is foreign news for us) gets special editions on state tv. That’s why I tune out of main stream media more than usual.

I think the typical US attitude top to bottom is “Yeah but that kind of stuff happens in those countries ALL THE TIME.” The world needs to remember that the US is still a teenager in terms of being a nation and it acts very much that way. We are invincible until proven otherwise, myopic in our world view and look at nearly everyone else as second class citizens. Give us a couple of hundred more years. We’ll either be much wiser or gone.

Oh dsfkjg, you have no idea how much I agree with this. I also saw a report that called the Boston Bombing the “worst terrorist act since 9/11”. And I was like… *TABLEFLIP!* RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHH! That headline is so unspeakably, incredibly, intensely, moronically, asininely WRONG!!
I wanted to “terrorize” whomever wrote it.

I wish most reporters felt that way. Unfortunately that would require that they have both integrity and just a shred of human decency. These days, they’re all just trying to be the one that catches the next big story. They sit at their desks praying for some huge calamity to drop while they’re on watch. I think most of them would look at events like last week and think “Yeah! This is MY TIME! I’m going to be on the air 24/7 until this is over and then I’ll be a star!”. Cue the instant graphics and ominous theme music that always seem to appear within 30 minutes of every big story.

I’m pretty out of touch when it comes to news. Since the switch to digital signal, I can no longer get the local or national news shows, it wasn’t the greatest, but I do actually miss it. Now my news is whatever I see on Yahoo.ca as I’m going to check my email. Seems to be a lot of entertainment news, blah!
Prefer to live in my bubble and avoid the negative stuff.

I’m going to completely date myself here, but I was in high school when the whole OJ Simpson thing happened. I remember my dad calling to me in my dungeon lair of a basement to come watch the action as a helicopter followed the white Bronco for hours. I kinda stood there watching for about 30 seconds and just asked him to tell me what happened when it was over.

I’ve always been a newspaper reader since my days in college and I used to watch a fair amount of CNN international news. But ever since 911 I pretty much avoid any TV news. There’s one news “paper” site I regularly go to for their free downloadable PDF newspaper, click on and read through some of their news feeds, and then rely on Yahoo and other sites when/if I want more news.

19 Comments

My reaction is a mixture. I like to get the initial "what happened" and the initial response as close to real-time as possible, with the understanding that detailed specifics on what happened are going to be mighty thin on the ground for quite a while and about 90% of those details in the first hours generally turn out to be total bullshit.

When the 24-hour newsies start talking to people who knew the alleged perp or one of the victims in preschool 20 years ago and start trotting out the "analysts", I switch over to something else for a while. I'll get a top-of-hour or bottom-of-hour recap, which will usually cover anything new that may have popped up, then back to what I was doing.

The first time I really did this was 1995, the Murrah Building in OKC. The internet wasn't nearly what it was then (I hadn't yet switched over to a proper 'net dialup account, still being on GEnie, which had the Lynx text-only browser and generally sucked), but I had an uncle who was in that building (he was okay aside from a coating of dust and about 7 minutes missing from his personal timeline. Postal workrooms in Federal buildings are hardened to keep booms in, which also helps keep booms out) and his brother, a now-retired FBI agent, was one of the first feds on the scene – and one of the guys who escorted McVeigh off the chopper at Tinker AFB after he was flown back from Perry, so there was a personal interest there. (As it turns out, one of my HS classmates was one of the 168 victims — she was in the SS office tending to some paperwork issue or other and had a good chunk of the building land on her.)

So yeah, I'm a news junkie up to the point where the bullshit starts getting thick. Then I stop.

I remember being completely fixated on every detail of the Fukushima power plant coverage after the earthquake, and praying that the next bit of news would feature Godzilla. It would have been awesome. And I would have won a bet.

I also remember completely avoiding anything to do with the 2012 US Presidential elections. They started campaigning in February or March of that year, and wouldn't shut the fuck up about it for over eight months. My roommate's birthday was the day after elections, and we threw a "Huzzah! No More Politics!" party. We took shots until Dick Cheney looked attractive.

I tend to be like an empath for negativity, if I were to get sucked into the news it would ruin my mood for the week. That being said, I couldn't help but get sucked in when the news was happening live on Reddit and Twitter staying up much later than I should have.

As a non-american, Boston still dominated our news whereas similar (and deadlier) events within the same range of kilometers didn't even make the frontpage of the news. The hypocrisy of it is infuriating and reeks of racism.

Don't get me wrong: it's bad news, of course, but I would expect professional journalism to at least make an attempt to not totally ignore 36 dead in bombings on the same day in another country while Boston (again: this is foreign news for us) gets special editions on state tv. That's why I tune out of main stream media more than usual.

I think the typical US attitude top to bottom is "Yeah but that kind of stuff happens in those countries ALL THE TIME." The world needs to remember that the US is still a teenager in terms of being a nation and it acts very much that way. We are invincible until proven otherwise, myopic in our world view and look at nearly everyone else as second class citizens. Give us a couple of hundred more years. We'll either be much wiser or gone.

Oh dsfkjg, you have no idea how much I agree with this. I also saw a report that called the Boston Bombing the "worst terrorist act since 9/11". And I was like… *TABLEFLIP!* RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHH! That headline is so unspeakably, incredibly, intensely, moronically, asininely WRONG!!
I wanted to "terrorize" whomever wrote it.

I wish most reporters felt that way. Unfortunately that would require that they have both integrity and just a shred of human decency. These days, they're all just trying to be the one that catches the next big story. They sit at their desks praying for some huge calamity to drop while they're on watch. I think most of them would look at events like last week and think "Yeah! This is MY TIME! I'm going to be on the air 24/7 until this is over and then I'll be a star!". Cue the instant graphics and ominous theme music that always seem to appear within 30 minutes of every big story.

I'm pretty out of touch when it comes to news. Since the switch to digital signal, I can no longer get the local or national news shows, it wasn't the greatest, but I do actually miss it. Now my news is whatever I see on Yahoo.ca as I'm going to check my email. Seems to be a lot of entertainment news, blah!
Prefer to live in my bubble and avoid the negative stuff.

I’m going to completely date myself here, but I was in high school when the whole OJ Simpson thing happened. I remember my dad calling to me in my dungeon lair of a basement to come watch the action as a helicopter followed the white Bronco for hours. I kinda stood there watching for about 30 seconds and just asked him to tell me what happened when it was over.